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Thursday, July 7, 2011

Sofware Management Antipatterns: E-Mail is Dangerous

Using e-mail is an important communication tool in software companies, but performing communications mostly with e-mail is dangerous. In this post, this issue will be detailed together with common e-mail mistakes. This information can be generalized for most types of companies.

E-mails may be used for some kind of situations:

For sending a report, meeting record etc. which is not confidential, to a manager or a group.

For sending a short message which is not urgent, to a person who can’t be accessed via telephone and face-to-face.

E-mails should NOT be used for these situations:

For confidential messages and criticisms: E-mails can be distributed to other people or large groups easily, so this is not a good idea.

For situations which could be used as evidence in a court of law : For example, if you say “We will do X item in a month” to the customer with e-mail, it can be a mandatory item for you in the next days.

For explaining a complex topic: It will be time consuming to write hundreds of words. Speaking will be more effective.

For explaining an important, sensitive topic: Word emphasis, voice tone, gestures and mimics are very important for conversations. E-mails have none of them and this may cause misunderstandings.

And some e-mail suggestions:

Don’t use e-mail bodies as title, this is ridiculous:

Title: Please send me a report about X task.Body: nothing

Don’t put hundreds of people to your e-mail’s “TO” or “CC” list. Use BCC. Otherwise all people and spam softwares will know all e-mails:

Don’t use so many smiley images, big signature images, long signatures, colorful decoration templates in your e-mail. These are generally disgusting and unnecessary. Besides, they will increase network load.